Lets be honest.
Using the armory is over all a better way to get the stats and I'm not talking about the character history or activity or anything else like that.
What i mean are the clean stats. xx% horde characters existing on realm xx for example. No filter at all.
For that a armory Analysis can't be tricked out and it's the best way over all.
The coolest thing would be if the armory itself would have alle the information warcaftrealms is given. Not that i want to underrate your hard work you did the last years. But if a side would have to make millions of request to analyse all 4 (or was it 3 or what ^^?) armorys its kinda ineffective.

Thats what i wanted to say first.

Balgair wrote:

Problem with that logic is there's more characters at 80 than at 10-79 right now

To get to the quote above..
What also was mentioned here in the thread is that max level chars are very static. So scanning one time per month for them to update all characters that census could not catch up is a good way to get the right stats.
But you can't scan characters from 10 to 79/84 who are frequently updating only one time per month...

You are getting two things confused with eachother. Armories (and we are talking about only two, as WCR only collects data on US and EU servers) remember every single character in existance, whether active or not. The values we store here, based on our censuses, represent the amount of characters we have seen ACTIVE (in the past 30 days). And the history archives contain data... that Blizzard doesn't have. I can't armory check a character that no longer exists or that has had it's name changed... but I can try to find it on WCR.

For the max level characters... as we discussed earlier... On heavily censused realms most 80s get seen regularly. And even on those that see less censuses... if someone gets seen, it's more likely to be an 80, not one of the smaller characters.

And we are not going to scan the frequently updating characters just once. What we were discussing was the amount of armory crawling we could theoretically do without crashing the site or Blizzard's armory servers to supplement our efforts. Did you think we are going to quit and let a crawler replace our efforts???

I find it hard to believe more than 3500 characters has migrated from the server or been deleted in the last 30 days... I've not even been censusing this server for a full month as I just transferred to it myself...http://www.warcraftrealms.com/census.php?serverid=324

It is entirely possible that there's just been less people playing in the past couple of weeks than there were a month ago - populations tend to drop in the run-up to an expansion, people take breaks etc, so there could well just be less active people than before. If it goes up again in a few days (with the final stage of the elemental invasion happening, that may get some interest), then it's probably just natural population changing - it will definitely go up in December when Cataclysm comes out, anyway!_________________EU-Draenor:
-- Sagart - Tairbh - Balgair - Buinne - Eilnich - Ruire - Dubh - Laidir - Naomh - Falaich --

I think this definitely offers some ability to help add some additional data. The biggest problem is to provide the kind of data we look for here, would require crawling the armory at rates that Blizzard would probably not like, just as ER mentions.

At any rate, Kenny, thank you for posting this up and I will investigate how I might be able to incorporate these into our offerings._________________phpbb:phpinfo()